“No, Darryl. There’s only one Meg. And there’s only one fled, too, and everyone else, for that matter. Thank you for sharing your feelings about her.” Which probably went for most of the other patients as well. I excused myself and crossed the lawn to speak with “Mama” fled.
“Dr. b!” she called out when she saw me coming toward her. “I’ve missed you!”
I had only left her an hour before, so I assumed she was joking. “Let’s talk.”
“What—again? Don’t you ever get tired of the gum-flapping?”
“I’m beginning to. Especially since I never get any answers.” Several of the patients were standing around, waiting, listening. “Let’s go somewhere else, shall we?”
“She’s not really pregnant, you know.”
“Thanks, Rick. That helps a lot.”
Since we were already on the back forty, we went into the nearby Villers wing, which I hadn’t visited for some time. I asked fled whether she had ever been in it before. “Sure,” she said. “Had sex with a guy right on that sofa over there.”
Maybe she was lying about all the sex, too. Sometimes very shy people do that in order to cover up their lack of experience. Of course fled had shown no evidence whatever for shyness. “Really? Who?”
“I told you before—”
“Yeah, I remember. You don’t screw and tell.” I directed her to the solarium, which has a nice view of the rear lawn. In a corner stood Jerry’s sculpture of the Taj Mahal. “Let’s sit here.”
“Sure, boss.” She plopped down in one of the plastic chairs.
“All right. This time I want some answers.”
“Then I want some questions.”
“Okay, here’s the first one: what did you do to Jerry?”
“Oh, not much, really. He just had some loose wires that needed to be connected.”
“Which wires?”
“Sorry, doc. If I told you that, you’d be drilling into all the heads in the hospital. Worse, your government would be zapping all their secret prisoners.”
“Secret?”
“Wake up and smell the feces, gino.”
“I think I’m getting a whiff of it already. You’re a phony, aren’t you? You don’t know a damn thing about neurology.”
“Really, gene? Why don’t you have a little chat with jerry?”
“And you’re not really pregnant, are you? This is all a ruse to get the patients to listen to you, am I right? What are you planning to do—talk all of them into going to K-PAX with you?”
“Don’t have to. Most of them have been waiting years for me to pick them up.”
“But why do you want a bunch of crazy people on K-PAX?”
“They’re not ‘crazy.’ They’re damaged.”
“And what about Naraba? Are you faking that, too?”
“What would it take to make a believer out of you, gino? You want to go for that ride in the sky now? Or would even that not convince you? I fixed Jerry’s circuits, I’m pregnant, and naraba wants to stay away from human beings of all races, creeds, and countries of origin. If you can’t believe any of that, we might as well discontinue our little talks, don’t you think?”
“You’re right. On one level I believe everything you’ve told me. But there’s never any proof. You have to admit it’s a lot for a person to swallow.”
“Yes, for a small-throated sapien I suppose it is. But every word is true, regardless of whether you can digest them or not. Next question.”
“If I told you that Naraba and the chimpanzee from Rwanda or Cameroon are alter egos, and that they live in your head and nowhere else, would you be able to swallow it?”
“No.”
“Why should I believe you when you don’t believe me?”
“Because, for humans, beliefs are mental concoctions that help you cope with a cruel and stupid WORLD. They have nothing to do with the truth. Prot already pointed that out to you, remember?”
“All right, let’s change the topic. Is Naraba going with you to K-PAX?”
“If she wants to. That leaves 99,999 seats. You want one of them?”
“Not just yet. Now tell me the truth: how many of those 99,999 have you lined up already?”
“Most of them. But don’t worry—all the rest will be ready when the time comes.”
“And that time is fast approaching, right?”
“Still another week to the first window, gino. I won’t know until the day before.”
“I’d appreciate a little more notice than that.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say I don’t like to be left in the dark.”
“You’re already in the dark, my friend. I’ve concluded you must prefer it that way.”
“Thanks again.”
“No prob.”
“Now about your pregnancy: would you be willing to undergo a test to confirm that?”
“Sure. I’ll pee on your paper if you like. But it might not work. Our hormones aren’t exactly the same as yours, you know.” She was right; the lab results had come back and, though her DNA pattern and blood profile were similar to ours, they were not exactly the same. And they were different, as well, from those of her friends, the chimpanzees.
“But your blood and urine tests already gave us the baseline values,” I countered. “It’s the changes we would look for. Can’t you give us a just little more?”
“Oh, all right. But you’re a bloodthirsty lot—do you know that? And urinethirsty, too.”
“And can you make a list of everyone you’ve had—ah—sex with since you’ve been on our planet?”
“I already told you—”
“All right, no names, just how many and what species.”
“Sorry, doc, I really haven’t kept any records.”
“Yes, but you remember them all, right? So how many have there been in total? Approximately.”
“Fifty-seven. So far….”
“And out of that fifty-seven, how many were human?”
“Four.”
“Who were they?”
“You don’t know them. Except for the patients, of course.”
“How many patients?”
“Two.”
“Who besides Howard?”
“You’re wasting your precious time.”
“Okay, one final question before I forget again: would you like to come to my home—or my son-in-law Steve’s—for a picnic?”
“No, thanks.”
“Why not?”
“Are you familiar with the word ‘boooooooooring’?”
“Oh. Well, would you be willing to talk briefly with Steve and his family anyway? Without the picnic? You could consider it part of your study of life on Earth—typical Homo sapiens and all that.”
“From what I’ve heard, they’re not so typical.”
“All right, atypical Homo sapiens.”
“What would we talk about?”
“I think Steve wants to ask you about the universe. I don’t know what the rest of them want to know.”
“I told you: that stuff doesn’t interest me.”
“You mean you don’t know anything about the subject?”
She stared at me for a moment before wagging her head and sighing loudly. “Oh, all right—I’ll try to work them into my busy schedule….”
“And finally, the TV people are coming Wednesday morning. That’s the day after tomorrow, if you haven’t been keeping track. Will you be here then?”